Cognitive psychology
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Cognitive psychology is a branch of
psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language. The school of thought arising from this approach is known as
cognitivism which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing. It had its foundations in the
Gestalt psychology of
Max Wertheimer,
Wolfgang Köhler, and
Kurt Koffka, and in the work of
Jean Piaget, who provided a theory of stages/phases that describe children's cognitive development. Cognitive psychologists use
psychophysical and experimental approaches to understand, diagnose, and solve problems, concerning themselves with the mental processes which mediate between stimulus and response. Cognitive theory contends that solutions to problems take the form of
algorithms—rules that are not necessarily understood but promise a solution, or
heuristics—rules that are understood but that do not always guarantee solutions.
Cognitive science differs from cognitive psychology in that algorithms that are intended to simulate human behavior are implemented or implementable on a computer. In other instances, solutions may be found through insight, a sudden awareness of relationships.
History
Ulric Neisser coined the term 'cognitive psychology' in his book published in 1967 (Cognitive Psychology), wherein Neisser provides a definition of cognitive psychology characterizing people as dynamic information-processing systems whose mental operations might be described in computational terms. Also emphasising that it is a
point of view which postulates the mind as having a certain conceptual structure. Neisser's point of view endows the discipline a scope which expands beyond high-level concepts such as "reasoning", often espoused in other works as a definition of cognitive psychology. Neisser's definition of
cognition illustrates this well:
...the term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every (1) psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts.
Cognitive psychology is radically different from previous psychological approaches in two key ways.
- It accepts the use of the scientific method, and generally rejects introspection (2) as a valid method of investigation, unlike symbol-driven approaches such as Freudian psychology.{{POV-statement|date=October 2008}}
- It explicitly acknowledges the existence of internal mental states (such as belief, desire and motivation) unlike behaviorist psychology. Critics hold that the empiricism of cognitive psychology combined with the acceptance of internal mental states by cognitive psychology is contradictory.
The school of thought arising from this approach is known as
cognitivism.Cognitive psychology is one of the more recent additions to psychological research, having only developed as a separate area within the discipline since the late 1950s and early 1960s following the "cognitive revolution" initiated by
Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique
(3) of behaviorism and empiricism more generally. The origins of cognitive thinking such as computational theory of mind can be traced as early as
Descartes and
Alan Turing. The cognitive approach was brought to prominence by
Donald Broadbent's book
Perception and Communication in 1958. Since that time, the dominant
paradigm in the area has been the
information processing model of cognition that Broadbent put forward. This is a way of thinking and reasoning about mental processes, envisioning them as software running on the computer that is the brain. Theories refer to forms of input, representation, computation or processing, and outputs. Applied to language as the primary mental knowledge representation system, cognitive psychology has exploited tree and network mental models. Its singular contribution to AI and psychology in general is the notion of a
semantic network. One of the first cognitive psychologists,
George Miller is well-known for dedicating his career to the development of
WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. Development began in 1985 and is now the foundation for many machine ontologies.This way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to find cognitive theories within
social psychology,
personality psychology,
abnormal psychology, and
developmental psychology; the application of cognitive theories to
comparative psychology has driven many recent studies in
animal cognition. However, cognitive psychology dealing with the intervening constructs of the mental presentations is not able to specify: What are the non-material counterparts of material objects? For example, what is the counterpart of a chair in a mental processes, and how do the non-material processes evolve in the mind that has no space. Further, what are the very specific qualities of the mental causalities? In particular, when the causalities are processes. The plain statement about information processing awakes some questions. What information is dealt with, its contents, and form. Are there transformations? What are the nature of process causalities? How subjective states of a person transmute into shared states, and on the other way around? Finally, yet importantly, how do we who work with cognitive research are able to conceptualize the mental counter concepts to construct theories that have real importance in real every day life? Consequently, there is a lack of specific process concepts which enable to derive new developments, and create grand theories about the mind, and its abysses. The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is currently being questioned by new approaches in psychology, such as
dynamical systems, and the
embodiment perspective. Because of the use of computational metaphors and terminology, cognitive psychology was able to benefit greatly from the flourishing of research in
artificial intelligence and other related areas in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the inter-disciplinary subject of
cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.
(4) Major research areas in cognitive psychology
Perception
Categorization
Memory
Knowledge representation
Numerical cognitionLanguage
Thinking
Influential cognitive psychologists
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See also
References
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[abstract Social Science Information, Vol. 39, No. 1, 115-129 (2000)]
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[Schunk, Dale H. Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th. Pearson, Merrill Prentice Hall. 1991, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008. pp. 14, 28]
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[Chomsky, N. A. (1959), A Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior]
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[ R. Sun, (ed.), (2008). The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology. Cambridge University Press, New York. 2008. ]
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